OpenSim numbers down as two popular grids drop stats

Key OpenSim stats fell this month, as two popular grids — InWorldz and The Adult Grid — opted not to report their total land area or their active users.

InWorldz has been the most popular grid every month from 2012 on, and had 5,276 active users last month. However, both their active users and total region numbers have been falling over the course of the past year and, saying that they didn’t want to be unfavorably — and, they said, unfairly — compared to other grids, they stopped publishing these numbers.

The Adult Grid did not explain why they stopped publishing their stats, which have actually been rising recently. The grid was on our 25 most popular grids list last month, as well.

“The amount of registered users will be the only one provided as seen on our website,” grid co-founder Constanza Amsterdam told Hypergrid Business.

The Adult Grid reported 355 active users last month, and the equivalent of 428 standard regions.

Mostly as a result of these reporting changes, but also due to the loss of a few hundred active users on OSgrid and Metropolis grid, the total number of active users went down by 6,140, for a new total of 30,588 active users this month.

Both InWorldz and The Adult Grid are closed grids, meaning that users cannot connect home-hosted regions, or teleport to other grids.

Without their numbers, the proportion of active users who are on hypergrid-enabled grids has risen to 97 percent, up from 79 percent last month. Again, this does not mean that 97 percent of all active OpenSim users are on the hypergrid. It means that 97 percent of users on grids that report their stats are on the hypergrid.

We now have 230 active hypergrid-enabled grids in our database, 45 grids that are not on the hypergrid, and four grids that we haven’t yet figured out — Atlantis, Moonlight Grid, and OpenSim Pride 2017.

The total number of standard region equivalents also fell, by 468, for a new total of 73,420. The hypergrid now accounts for 97 percent of reported land area in OpenSim, up from 95 percent last month. The change is less dramatic because the InWorldz and The Adult Grid accounted for a smaller share of land area than they did of active users.

Registered users continued to increase, since both grids continued to report those stats, to 544,008. However, registered users totals only go down when an entire grid goes out of business, since grids rarely delete unused user accounts from the databases.

Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)

OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.

Popularity

When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is: the busier, the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience… you get the idea.

OSgrid was the most popular of the grids that reported their numbers this month. Again, it is almost certain that InWorldz would have been at the top of the list if they were still publishing these stats.

We’ve added hypergrid addresses to the list this month, to make it easier for readers to visit the grids that are hypergrid-enabled. To visit other grids, please click on the grid name to go to the grid’s website, and follow the provided instructions to create a new avatar account and configure your viewer.

The biggest gainer this month was Island Oasis, with 195 new active users, followed by The Public World at 158, OpenSimLife with 123 new active users, Dynamic Worldz with 101 and Virtual ABDL Grid with 100.

That put the grid in fourth place in new registrations, after Kitely with 2,288 new registrations, followed by InWorldz with 1,781, and Emilac with 963.

The full list of all hypergrid-enabled grids, ranked by traffic numbers, can be found here.

Kitely Market now reaches 190 grids

Kitely Market, OpenSim’s online marketplace, now delivers to 190 grids. That’s more than two-thirds of the total number of grids in our database.

There are currently 9,347 products listed at the market, and these contain 17,768 product variations, of which 13,116 are exportable.

Growth in exportable and non-exportable content on the Kitely Market. (Kitely data.)

Ever since Kitely turned on the hypergrid export functionality, exportable content has been growing at a much faster rate than non-exportables, as merchants increasingly become comfortable to selling to the hypergrid.

Some grids have Gloebits as their official in-world currency, used throughout the grid. Other grids have Gloebits enabled on just a few regions, while using their own currency elsewhere, or leave the choice up to the region owner.

Genesis Metaverse revamps Welcome Center

The Genesis Metaverse grid redesigned its welcome center.

Some content was purchased for the rebuilt, but some was also created by grid residents, grid owner Cliff Hopkins told Hypergrid Business.

“It looks stunning,” he said. “The pictures really do it no justice.”

(Image courtesy Genesis MetaVerse.)

International Spaceflight Museum to launch next week

The International Spaceflight Museum, a Texas-based non-profit corporation solely supported by private donors and which has operated in Second Life since 2005, will have a grand opening ceremony for its Kitely branch of the museum at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday, April 21 on Kitely’s ISMuseum region.

It will be a four-region world and open to the public, including hypergridders, ISMuseum president and founder Kat Lemieux told Hypergrid Business.

“The Grand Opening will include entertainment by Agatha, and a reading of a Robert Heinlein story by Seanchai, which we hope to broadcast into Second Life to demonstrate our new cross-grid communications capabilities,” she said.

(Image courtesy International Spaceflight Museum.)

The team wants to add new exhibits, new looks and a suggestion box where interested visitors can offer their ideas on how to enlarge and improve the collection.

The will be exhibiting a variety of items.

“Some of the exhibits include full-scale rockets, including a Saturn V and a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, and several Brazilian sounding rockets,” she said. “We also have full-scale models of several space probes and satellites, and a Lunar Rover, to name just a few of the attractions.”
The hypergrid address is grid.kitely.com:8002:ISMuseum.

The new grid now has 31 users on its four public and three private regions. Infinite Metaverse Alliance is a research and development foundation that seeks to improve and streamline OpenSim code development, standards and technologies.

Grids that have been suspended for more than two months will be marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, it may have been marked closed when it shouldn’t be. Please let us know.

And if there’s a public grid we’re not tracking, please email us at [email protected]. There’s no centralized way to find OpenSim grids, so if you don’t tell us about it, and Google doesn’t alert us, we won’t know about it.

By “public,” we mean grids that allow hypergrid visitors, or have a website where people can register for or request accounts.

In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be undercounted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.

April Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,232 different publicly-accessible grids, 278 of which were active this month, and 207 of which published their statistics.

David Kariuki is a technology journalist who has a wide range of experience reporting about modern technology solutions. A graduate of Kenya's Moi University, he also writes for Cleanleap, and has previously worked for Resources Quarterly and Construction Review. Email him at [email protected].

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